I used to read Ebert's reviews just because I liked his writing style, but I have to say that I doubt this is the first movie he's done this to. On several occasions I read one of his reviews wherein he offered some comment on the plot or story that made no sense in light of the film itself. Either he's not that bright ("he IS an Obama supporter", Rev added snarkily) or he skips (or at least avoids paying attention to) large sections of some of the movies he watches.

I reviewed movies for two college papers. I think he's correct that you don't write reviews for movies you don't watch. You don't have to go to anything (though obviously you'd be remiss to skip big films that people will want reviews on), but it's bad to review something you haven't seen to the end.

That's why it's a job and not leisure time. You have to sit through some real junk.

Confession: I didn't leave, but I did fall asleep twice during The Omega Code which probably received my most negative review ever. I did note my naps in the review. (Still I should have been more vigilant, but then college paper money isn't Ebert money, and the review was a student body favorite which made the paper happy.)

As are his two blog posts explaining himself: the first why he gave a review of 8-minutes, the second why he wished he hadn't. I don't think he had anything to apologize for, but I understand his reasons, and am glad at least that this apology is a reasoned and calm one, and not of the abject and shameful "drinking problem" type we see so much of in politics. It is certainly not as characterized at the link the Professor has provided.

I stopped paying attention to Ebert when he reviewed the little horror movie The Hitcher. He and Siskel went on Carson to decry the violence of the film.

But if you actually watch the movie, the fact is you see almost none of the violence. It's almost all implicit or after the fact, except for a scene toward the end which is comparable to a chase scene in an action movie.

It was precisely the sort of horror movie (favoring suspense, implication, and off-screen violence) you could have heard the two bitching about nobody making.

Movie reviews are like Supreme Court cases: First the decisions are made, then the justifications.

No one says it better than the commenter on the LA Times article site that Ann linked to:

More discouraging than Ebert's unprofessionalism in reviewing a movie without watching it is his apparent willingness to write off approximately half of America as homophobes due to their support of Sarah Palin. "The Palin Belt?" It's sad to watch a man who was once one of the most respected film critics in the world resort to baseless personal attacks on millions of people that he has never even met, attacks that don't even have anything at all to do with films. I grew up looking forward to reading Ebert's reviews in the local paper before deciding what to see, lately he's only valuable as a meter of what films to avoid, namely, anything he likes...

I'm a big fan of Ebert. He's smart and witty and he knows how to call crap by its proper name. He coined the expression "Stop the Idiot" to describe plotlines in which if you could stop someone from being an idiot the movie would end in, er, the first 8 minutes.

This is true, but it only really started to get in the way of his ability to do his job during the last eight years, which was well after he'd passed his peak anyway. My personal favorite example of his decent into leftie self-parody was his article a few weeks back in which he berated Sarah Palin for... never having been to Europe. Because, according to Ebert, all intelligent and intellectually curious people want to visit Europe as soon as they can.

I caught that too. Maybe Ebert, who praised Gore's academy award winning documentary, didn't know that trans-atlantic flights leave a huge carbon footprint. Very bad for the environment. Like a year's worth of driving every day.

I love when "journalists" lecture the rest of us who are more educated and better informed than they are about how things are.

Ebert gave "W." four stars. Four stars. That should tell you about Ebert's discerning palate for celluloid these days.

He jumped the shark awhile back but 4 stars for W. It's a fucking Oliver Stone "film" for godsakes.

No doubt many of the films Ebert says are bad really are bad, but I'm reminded of the instance where a pair of those popular film reviewers (I don't remember if Ebert was included or not) solemnly proclaimed the S.F. movie Dune as “the worst movie of the last ten years” — which is complete rot. Not only that, they declared that even people who had read the book and knew the story of Dune couldn't follow the film — which is absolutely untrue.

Ebert is a tool and nothing more than a legend in is own mind. He is an over paid hack. I remember him from years ago when he used to drink. He was a no talent mean drunk. The only thing that changed is he is no longer a drunk.

Althouse has one or twice judged flms she hasn't seen one minute of, which is misguided. But Ebert states he has always revealed when he has walked out of a movie, and he did disclose his walk-out in this review, so that's okay.

lem: Before Ebert's serious health problem he suffered from a kind of subtle scourge, otherwise known as too-many-thumbs-upitis ;)

I agree with you that he gives too many thumbs up. But you have to understand what a "thumbs up" means, to be fair. I used to be on Ebert's compuserve forum where he'd reply to people every day, and a lot of people questioned his generous thumb. He explained that the "thumbs up" thing became good for marketing, but really you have to read his whole review. He also explained that 3 stars (which get a "thumbs up") simply means that if you're a fan of the genre it's worth checking out. Ebert is a massive movie fan, so it is highly likely he'll give 3 stars to merely decent movies within a genre, many of which lots of people won't think are so good if they're not into that particular genre. It's when he gives 3.5 to 4 stars that he's saying it's a movie he hopes everyone will see.

IOW, Ebert's generous thumb is because he loves movies, and he loves the various genres of movies mostly without snobbery. You have to pay attention to how many stars he actually gave it, and to the print review, in order to get a feel for whether he thinks, say, this is a sci-fi for fans of sci-fi flicks, or this is a sci-fi flick that he hopes everyone will see. 4 stars is a movie he thinks is great regardless of how you feel about the genre. 3 stars is a good movie within its genre. 3.5 is somwhere in between. The print review is what he hopes you'll pay most attention to. This is how I recall he explained it back on his Compuserve forum. And he'd mock Siskel for not writing full-length reviews. But I always thought Siskel had slightly better taste than Ebert!

Ebert is a massive movie fan, so it is highly likely he'll give 3 stars to merely decent movies within a genre, many of which lots of people won't think are so good if they're not into that particular genre.

That's the excuse he's given for his periodic three-star reviews of movies like "Speed 2: Cruise Control", but it doesn't hold water. He gets flak for those reviews because even fans of the genre -- *especially* fans of the genre -- thought those movies sucked. He also has a habit of giving bad reviews to movies that are generally well-liked by fans of a genre but which he doesn't like as movies. "Saw" and "Pitch Black" got two stars, "Resident Evil" got one, etc.

Ebert's problem is that his tastes are neither highbrow nor mainstream, so nobody can really tell if his written reviews are reliable or not. The various review *shows* worked better, because the audience got to see clips of the movies in question and hear some back-and-forth discussion of them.

The problem with most reviewers, Ebert especially, is that they are both movie buffs and Hollywood insiders--the way they view movies really is different from how the average person views movies. Add to that a reverence for certain personalities for one reason or another (getting invited to screenings being the most basic) and reviewers become rather unreliable in general. The best you can do is figure out which reviewers you reliably agree or disagree with and use that as a guide. It also helps if you learn the lingo--if someone tells me a movie is thoughtful, I avoid it.

One really big problem reviewers face was highlighted by Michael Medved (who I think stinks as a reviewer); he pointed out that a reviewer sees upwards to 300 movies a year, sometimes several in a day, often in an empty theater with only a few other reviewers present. Most movies suck and suck bad--this has always been true--so when you watch three movies in a day and the third movie doesn't completely stink, anyone would end up overrating it.